The present invention generally relates to bandwidth aggregation, and more particularly, to bandwidth aggregation from multiple cellular devices.
A user device can access a cellular network for connectivity to external networks (e.g., the Internet). The cellular network establishes a bearer connection with the user device, and provides the user device with a certain amount of network bandwidth. The amount of network bandwidth is limited by the bearer policies set by a service provider of the cellular network. A user device may host a WiFi network (e.g. a WiFi “hotspot”) in which the cellular connection of the user device is shared with companion devices (e.g., another user device, such as a laptop, tablet device, etc.).
The bandwidth of the companion device is limited to the bandwidth of the cellular connection of the user device. A group users may need to use their companion devices to access an ad hoc WiFi hotspot with greater throughput than any of their cellular devices can provide individually. For example, a team of co-workers may need to connect their laptop PCs or tablets to a local WiFi network for collaborative work, and the team may need that local WiFi network to have high speed Internet access to be shared by all of the laptops and tablets. There currently is no known application or algorithm that enables users to voluntarily and automatically combine the wireless wide area broadband (e.g., cell phone) bandwidth of their individual devices into a single higher speed connection to the Internet that can be made available for a WiFi hotspot.